Douglas Whaley

  After any life-altering experience (in my case a heart transplant) it’s required by law that one start a blog.   My transplant was five years ago this Thanksgiving, and this December the blog will also be five.   But today the 300,000 th hit occurred, and I’m very pleased by that. My blog has not been either the usual “What I Did Today” nor a steady commentary on one particular subject.   Instead I’ve tended to write mini-essays on many different topics: gay rights, atheism, law, family stories, cats, etc.   I’ve published a lot of works in my life: numerous law review articles, seven textbooks used nationwide to teach various aspects of commercial law, three student guides that paid enough to be a major factor in getting my son through college, two novels, and even columns in minor publications, but nothing turns out to have been as important to me as this blog.   It contains my entire life: my history, my philosophy, my advice on many topics fr...

  1.   I Had a Heart Transplant. Of course, this is the obvious sentence to start with.   Only about 3,500 heart transplants are performed annually throughout the world, so there aren’t a lot of people who can say that they are walking around with someone else’s heart beating inside them. I had had a failing heart since 1999 when I developed atrial fibrillation and from that an enlarged heart. For the next ten years I was treated by a cardiologist at Ohio State University’s Ross Heart Hospital, and it was clear that my heart was failing. In January of 2009 I qualified for the heart transplant list, but because I was still able to get out and about, I was not high on that list. As recently as October of that year I was told that the transplant would likely take place in 2010, probably in the spring. It’s one thing intellectually to think you’re getting a heart transplant in 2010, and quite another months before that to receive a morning phone call (I was wor...